Old Flame
by merlinmercury
Summary: "You've changed," Death observes. God gives an awkward chuckle, and says sadly, "Everything has."


It's been a long time, even by Death's standards, since he was last face to face with his oldest friend. It is during a visit to Death's preferred pizza parlour in Chicago that he looks up to see God sitting in the seat opposite him. In order to walk among the humans, he wears the form of a recent prophet, a scruffy man with large, shadowed eyes that might appear naturally fearful if it weren't for the omnipotent being behind them.

Death is as difficult to startle as he is to impress, but he does raise an eyebrow in surprise.

"Fancy that," he says. "Hiding has finally bored you to me."

God looks down at the table, conjures up a plate of pizza for himself and begins cutting into it with a knife and fork. He avoids eye contact, which isn't something he used to do. Perhaps it is a feature of the vessel, or perhaps God has actually wearied of his vicious little children. He maintained such faith in them for so much longer than anyone else could, but even that was destined to wane and disappear someday; to Death more than anyone, everything this little planet has to offer is so perceptibly temporary.

"Sorry," God mutters, and Death knows from experience that he doesn't excel at apologies. Forgiveness has long been his party line, but confessing mistakes or regrets of his own has been rather a foreign concept.

"You've changed," Death observes.

God gives an awkward chuckle, and says sadly, "Everything has."

Death spent the time spanned by the second half of that self-help book God published for his little creations—the New Testament—locked underground, chained. God had allowed him to stay there, displeased by his enthusiasm for wiping away colonies of God's favourite apes. After Noah, God had insisted forgiveness was a better method for improving humanity than large-scale erasure and reconstruction. To this day, Death disagrees.

"Have you considered that perhaps we should conduct just a small—" Death begins to say, but God raises the hand that isn't folding pizza into his mouth, wordlessly cutting him off.

"No," God says. "As I've told you before, there will be no more floods, no more great purges of the Earth until the fire that marks the end of days. I vowed as much to Noah, and I am a God of my word."

Death is aware of this. He dislikes it, though, when God implies that Death's word is inferior; he keeps his promises too, he simply makes fewer of them—fewest of all being to humans.

"I thought that maybe it was time," says God. "I couldn't decide myself, but when I heard Michael and Lucifer were ending the world, I thought that that meant it would all be over. That everything in creation was shutting down around me. I thought it might be time to call you in for the last time."

The idea shakes Death a little. He's known forever of the likelihood that one day he would reap God, end all life once and for all, but he had sensed nothing to indicate that that time might be so rapidly approaching. Reaping humans, or the inhabitants of any single solar system, the small ephemeral creatures, has never bothered him—but the thought of God dying is perhaps the greatest of his concerns.

Death is the force of destruction; God, the force of creation. What, aside from himself, will remain once all creation is dead Death does not know—but he is sure it will be desolate and dark and eternal.

"It is not time," he tells God. "It will not be time for many years yet."

God swallows audibly, wipes pizza grease from his fingers and the corners of his mouth. "I'm trying to tell you that you were right," God says.

Death is a proud fellow, as is God, and though they have been civil, more than civil, to one another over the millennia, there has been some animosity between them ever since Adam and Eve were first placed upon the earth. Death has waited for his friend to realise the folly of placing his trust in the creatures, barely a step up from the other monkeys—but he never thought that the realisation would bring about this. His concern for humanity is negligible, but if he is to lose God along with them... Death had thought that he was prepared for this, but it is clear now that he has not been.

"I thought that I had created something good, but I just can't see it anymore. Everything's become so broken... and I don't even know if I want to try and fix it, this time around. It's been such a long time, Death—can't we let it be done now? All of it?"

Death slurps a long mouthful of his milkshake and decides in that moment to do something he never imagined he would do.

"No," he tells God. "I do not believe they are beyond hope."

"You too are changed," God remarks, after a pause.

Death stirs his drink with his straw. "I suppose I am."

God sighs. "So tell me what I should do. Why I should stay."

"Remember when, during the great flood, I asked you why Noah should be allowed to stay?" Death begins. "Why his species should be allowed to regenerate when they had been the cause of all that trouble in the first place?"

God nods. "Of course I do," he says, and the way his guard seems to have deteriorated since they last met makes it easier than ever for Death to see how hard causing so many casualties had been for his friend. How each one has continued to haunt him even though, to the two of them, all of human history appears rather like a single, poorly disciplined anthill. Or so Death has always been convinced.

"You said that their spirits were of a kind found nowhere else."

God laughs again, that sad, cracked laugh. "And you said that their greatest attribute was their ability to make pleasing bread."

"That I did—but, if you had listened to me then, this pizza would never have existed," Death points out. "I must admit I am no longer terribly disappointed that you decided to keep Noah after all."

"What are you saying?"

Death shrugs, like it isn't difficult for him to concede this, to for once give the impression of actually caring. "I'm saying that all is not lost. The evolution of mankind has come about through trial and error, and trial again. Perhaps something even greater than pizza will come of these troubled times."

God is looking at Death like he's never seen him before.

"In all of time, all of time, you have never spoken like this, my friend."

Death lets his silence acknowledge the fact.

"Why now?"

I am afraid of what will happen when you leave me, Death thinks, just for a split second, before tamping the sentiment down. He does not even know whether that would be sufficient motivation for God to remain; whether his company is enough—ironically—to continue living for.

Instead, he offers God another morsel of truth, one which has been building reluctantly in his mind for little more than a year.

"I once told you that humanity was nothing but a dead end."

"More than once," God reminds him.

"Yes. More than once," he agrees. "But I have encountered a few individuals who... defied my expectations, since then."

"Humans?" God asks tentatively.

"Indeed, humans," Death confirms.

God doesn't reply right away, but he can see him processing the statement, the faintest ghost of a smile appearing on his face—just enough to reignite that ancient flame of optimism which powers the universe and everything it contains.

It has never been Death's place to be hopeful or particularly benevolent—he and God have always held one another in check in that sense—but even more necessary than their respective roles has been the fact that they are two sides of the one coin; creation and destruction, fullness and emptiness, Life and Death. It is not a conversation that they have ever had, not in as many words, but it has always been known that if, every so often, their paths must cross for everything to remain in balance, then the one might step in for the other. God has opened his domain up to Death before, Noah's flood being one such occasion. Now, it seems, it is time for the opposite to occur. This infinitesimally tiny speck in time and space, this chapter of human history fitting in somewhere amongst an inestimable library of tomes—Death must admit that it is truly, even_ importantly_, unlike the rest.


End file.
